


Snipers' Fancy

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 23:14:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1244113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Scouts are poor boys from poor families. The Snipers are professionals. They come up with an arrangement that works for all of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snipers' Fancy

**Author's Note:**

> Who wants to read Team Fortress 2 fanfic I wrote four years ago? 
> 
> (I really hope you do, because I've been sitting on these for literally years, too shy to post them. There's more where this came from. I hope you enjoy it!)

“Man, I fuckin’ hate this,” the Scout muttered. He jogged around the base, hid behind some crates. Why were there so many old, rotten crates? What was the old place used for before it became their base? Was it even really a base? He had a five-second flash thought of the unsuspecting owners coming back to their…farm—or whatever it was, he didn’t know—and finding two enemy teams of mercenaries duking it out over land they didn’t even own.  
“Heh. Like the Hatfields and the McCraws.”

But speaking made him nervous; he glanced around furtively, and was thankful when he saw no one. He huddled over in the snow and blew into his hands, trying to warm his numb fingers. Even in the mittens his mother had sent, he couldn’t feel his hands; his fingers and toes were painfully numb and had been for nearly twenty minutes.  
But he couldn’t go back inside yet.

He doubled back, taking care to step into his own tracks the second time (the way the Spy had taught him), and hid inside one of the doorless wooden sheds, waiting and tense as a rat that smells cats. 

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I hate this,” he continued. He peeker around a corner, looking back towards the base’s lodging quarters, whose windows were lit up a cheery, warm yellow—stark contrast to the dead blue-white light of outdoors, where the sunlight fell palely onto the snow.

He stomped in place, jogged in place, and finally gave up and stood still, trying to catch his breath in the stabbing cold; inside the barn was chillier than outside, as the sun’s light could offer no warmth. 

Should this take this long? Where _was_ he?

He jogged back outside, paused, and ducked behind some barrels when he thought he heard someone coming. Why was this taking so long?

~

Inside the opposite base, the RED Medic watched him with a pair of tiny field binoculars, and reached absentmindedly for a mug of cocoa that the Heavy passed to him. 

“Has leetle man been shot yet?”  
“Nein. It appears that the Snipers are…trying something different.”

“Hmm.” Beside him, the RED Heavy shifted in his seat, and looked away from his own eye equipment—a pair of battered Soviet army surplus binoculars—and down from where he had been intently watching the opposite team’s sniper in his roost.

“You think he will let Scout go today?”  
“Nein,” the RED Medic said, primly, amused. “He will not pass up such a chance.”

~

Inside the BLU base common room, the Heavy watched the Scout and fretted. “You are sure this will not hurt leetle Scout? He is tiny, like baby. Cannot defend himself very well.” 

“The little weasel will be fine. Leave him.” the Spy spoke without looking up from his newspaper—though it was obvious he wasn’t reading it; it was almost two months old, and had been found on the kitchen table when they’d first arrived at the base.

“Bloody cold weather,” the Demoman said. He was bundled up almost up to his nose in tartan scarves and scratchy wool blankets, and was nursing a hot toddy that the Engineer had pressed on him. “Seems a shame tae have the skinny lad out there runnin’ about, an’ only fer a few extra pennies. At least I’d feel less guilty if a’ least if it weren’t so bloody cold…”

“Is almost cold like in mother Russia. Leetle Scout is only from America, where cold is like summer day. Leetle man will come back black and blue with frost-bitings…” the Heavy continued to worry. “Do you think snow is deeper out there than nearer here? Leetle Scout—”

“Eht’s nrt daht crrld, eht’s fhnn!” the Pyro piped up. He was sitting on the rug, happily melting icicles with a taper candle they’d found in a dusty, forgotten emergency kit. “Ah grrta mrrt snrrw. Ahd ezzy t’h shh Sphhs’ trckss.”

The Spy, at hearing that, shifted uncomfortably and rustled the paper. The Pyro had the tact to look at least a little embarrassed; the RED Pyro had caught on to the Spy’s walking-in-already-laid-tracks trick with alarming alacrity, probably because he’d seen the BLU Pyro doing it first.

“Ahh, an’ besides, Heavy, the Engineer said they worked out that bug with Respawn. Now, if ye die outside a’ battle, you don’t stay dead!” the Demoman added.  
The Heavy looked back out the window, at the small figure retracing its tracks in the snow for the umpteenth time. He didn’t like any of this.

~

Outside, the BLU Scout stuffed his fists into his armpits and stamped his feet, trying to force some feeling back into his toes. 

He huddled over, remembered the bargain, and stood up straighter, trying his hardest not to look like what he was—a skinny, cold kid, pacing back and forth in circles around the base for no apparent reason— _and_ wearing a loud, bright blue sweater, with a pattern of crosshairs knitted across the chest and between the shoulders.

Remembering the sweater was the last straw, however. He stuck out his chest, brazen as a jaybird, and crowed, “Cock-a-fuckin’-doodle-doo, man! GodDAMN it, wouldja just freakin’ shoot me already!” 

He flailed his arms, paused, waited for the signature red dot to appear on his chest, and ripped off his hat when it didn’t.

“You know what, fuck this! I don’t need the fuckin’ money this bad! It’s too fuckin’ cold! If you guys are just gonna—”

The upper half the Scout’s head disappeared in a red spray, and his body staggered two steps and collapsed backwards, spouting blood so hot that the snow it splattered on melted on contact.

In his roost, the RED Sniper grunted, pulled a stubby pencil out of a pocket on his vest, and drew a stick figure on a scratch-pad near his left hand. The kid wasn’t supposed to make it so _easy_ …

~

The RED Scout was more of a challenge. 

He loped easily around the outbuildings surrounding the RED base, careless of footprints, leaving skids in his wake where he turned too fast. He was treating the entire thing less like a business bargain and more like a workout; he didn’t acknowledge the BLU Sniper at all. 

The BLU Sniper had missed him three times in the past hour, simply because every time he drew a bead, the boy would either step sideways, or start moving again—either faster or slower than he’d been going before. 

He was getting pretty smug about it, too—he wore _his_ crosshairs sweater was like a mark of pride. It was a cherry-bomb red that looked almost supernaturally bright against the snow.

He paused a moment, safe in the curve between two buildings, and blew a bubble in the gum he’d been chewing to keep his mouth and throat moist. Just as it was getting nice and big, he saw a button-sized blue dot appear on the side of it.

He didn’t have time to duck before bullet splattered gum all over his face in a sticky, blinding sheet, leaving him stumbling forward. His foot struck a treacherous lump of ice and he slipped—

In the time it took him to regain his footing, the BLU Sniper calmly reloaded, snickering, and shot the kid dead-center in the back, the crosshairs on the sweater lined up with those of his scope perfectly. 

He marked off another line on his tally list, kept in a tiny steno pad, and calculated: he owed the RED Scout about two hundred dollars now—not a bad price to pay a living target. He made a pleased noise as he reached for his coffee mug, idly wondering how much the RED Sniper owed his own team’s Scout. 

He sighed, set the coffee aside, and took his knitting needles back up to wait for Respawn to pick up the felled RED Scout.

The sweaters had, of course, paid for themselves; and the time spent without the Scouts running amok in their respective bases was more than worth the money they were paying them. As a form of thanks to him for getting the boys out of their hair, the BLU Medic sent him hot drinks, and the RED Engineer sent him pastries, and they never, ever snickered again when they saw him winding yarn.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, and also...I think I wrote this for a TF2chan challenge? Idk? I never posted it, I don't think. I got too intimidated...


End file.
